1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to benchmarking reporting tools, and more particularly to benchmarking tools for comparing travel and expense account expenditures against peer groups consisting of comparable businesses.
2. Related Art
Businesses of all sizes want to gain control of travel and expense (“T&E”) costs, increase compliance with company policies and government regulations, and save money while doing it. The T&E spending incurred by businesses represents a large opportunity for savings, provided a complete picture of the spending is known. However, identifying practices that will improve corporate T&E processes, procedures, and policies can be expensive and time consuming.
Benchmarking tools allow a business to benefit from a comprehensive understanding of their T&E spending as well as how its spending compares with that of other companies. By customizing their analysis, businesses can further identify areas in which they can improve cost control and use the data to negotiate with suppliers. While some of the databases are consolidated, typically T&E spending data does not come from a single database.
Because data comes from various sources, existing benchmarking tools involve manual research. Using multiple public and private databases, the disparate pools of data on other companies (e.g., peer companies) must be collected and fed to the benchmarking tools. Once the multi-source T&E spending data are consolidated, the data must be processed and presented in a meaningful way in order to provide a complete picture of a business's T&E spending and how it compares against that of its peers.
Given the foregoing, what is needed is a system, method and computer program product for T&E benchmarking which receives data from T&E pools of data and provides comprehensive information and customized data analysis to the end user efficiently.